By: Doug VerBockel   

Trek Bikes and Bio-Digester plant tours…….There just has to be some connection besides being in the same city of Waterloo, Wisconsin.   How about carbon fiber and natural fiber? I’ll go with that for now.

On Tuesday August 23, IFMA Madison and IFMA Milwaukee met in the fine city of Waterloo for a couple of plant tours. We started at the Trek headquarters plant that has about 900 employees and has operated since 1976, when the company began.  This plant is the main production facility for many of their high end carbon fiber frames.  This Trek facility has a special program to make custom made bikes including custom hand painted frames with your name on the bike. The Waterloo plant is also the main marketing, engineering, development, research, fatigue and safety stress testing facility for the company.  They also have an assembly plant in Whitewater that does most of their complete bike assemblies in the United States.   We learned from the tour, that Trek manufactures about 50 to 65% of their total bike.  It was interesting to learn that there are different grades of carbon fiber but the basic material costs around $1400 per pound.  Many of the braking, seating and gear/drive train parts are purchased from complimentary companies.  

After the Trek tour was over, we went for a tour of the Clear Horizons/Crave Brothers bio-digester facility.  To put it simply, this facility takes a liquefied manure mixture from 1600 cows, pumps it into two huge holding tanks which captures methane which is then converted into fuel to generate electricity.  Let’s just say it is quite a continuous flow process.  They generate about 5000MWh of electricity which is enough to power about 500 homes.  This facility converts the resulting solids into bedding and an organic potting soil mix.  The resultant liquid is approximately 90% odor free and is used as fertilizer on farm fields.   Finally, this facility is responsible for destroying (using) 18,000 tons of CO2 produced by the dairy cows as well as displacing 5,500 tons of Co2 from coal fired power plants. Time will tell if this type of reuse increases for the more than 1 million dairy cows in Wisconsin.